If 2021 was any kind of normal year, Ron Blomberg and I would be doing in-person book events all over the place right now to promote The Captain & Me.
Alas, while this year has been a marked improvement over the utter shitshow that was 2020, things are still not "back to normal" enough for us to be making the scene in that time-honored way. I will, however, be joining the esteemed authors pictured above this Friday afternoon at 4 pm ET for a virtual panel as part of a series of events hosted by Denver, CO bookstore Tattered Cover in conjunction with this year's MLB All-Star Game.
This event — which focuses on the many challenges involved with telling a ballplayer's story — is free to all, but you have to register in advance here to view it. Should be a lot of fun, though, so I hope you'll tune in for it. (And click here to check out the full list of the bookstore's ASG-related events.)
And speaking of tuning in... I spent much of this past spring working on a new documentary series for AXS TV called If These Walls Could Rock. Each episode explores the history and legacy of a particular live music venue; some world-famous, some obscure, but all incredibly fascinating. The debut episode, which premieres tonight, covers South Carolina's Old Brick Church — an early 19th century structure which now serves as a venue for acoustic shows, but was once the site of The Cainhoy Riot, an 1876 clash between Black residents of the era and white paramilitary forces who sought to suppress the local Black vote through violence and intimidation. (Hmmm... sound at all familiar?)
I served as the main writer on this particular episode, and I'm really proud of how it turned out. I hope you'll give it a look if you have the chance; if you miss the premiere tonight, it will still be available through the channel for later viewing. (Whether or not you have access to AXS depends a lot on your cable set-up. But if you have a Roku, I can attest from personal experience that it's really easy to add AXS to your Roku channels free of charge.)
Here's the trailer for the Old Brick Church episode:
Well, it's certainly been a long time coming. The COVID-19 pandemic washed out all the book-signing events Ron Blomberg and I were supposed to do last year for The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson, and various other challenges have prevented Ron and I from getting together since then — with the upshot being that the opportunities to purchase copies of the book signed by the both of us have been pretty much non-existent.
UNTIL NOW...
Yes, folks, that's right — for a limited time only (that is, until I run out of copies), I will be selling first-edition hardcovers of "The Captain & Me" signed by both Ron and myself. The cost is $50 per copy, shipping and handling included. (That offer is for customers in the US only; if you want me to ship the book to you in Canada or overseas, let me know and I'll try and figure out what your additional cost will be.)
You can purchase the copies from me via Venmo (@Dan-Epstein-15) or PayPal ([email protected]). Please include your shipping address in the transaction info, as well as the name of whomever you would like the book to be signed to. Makes a great gift for any Yankees fan, or any 70s baseball fan in general!
Act now while supplies last! All sales proceeds will go to the HELP DAN MOVE TO NEW YORK FUND, which I hope you all will agree is a worthy cause...
Sorry for the lack of updates; there's been a lot going on in these parts. The biggest (and saddest) news is that my wife and I are splitting up, and I'll likely be moving from North Carolina to New York's Hudson Valley (where I'll be much closer to my folks) in the next few months. It's an amicable split, and for the best, but it's been a heavy and emotional time for us. Please send good vibes.
Thankfully, I've had plenty of work to keep me distracted, including this FLOOD magazine interview with Steven McDonald of Redd Kross, which I conducted in honor of the new 35th Anniversary edition of Neurotica, which drops June 24 via Merge Records. Neurotica was an absolute revelation to me when I first heard it in the fall of 1987, so it was a real treat to be able to speak with Steven about the making of the album, as well as get the lowdown on the bonus disc of 1986 demos included in the 35th Anniversary reissue — which includes a (to me at least) vastly superior version of "What They Say," which is not only much rawer than the one that made it onto the finished album, but also features a completely unhinged vocal by Robert Hecker in full-blown Paul Stanley mode. If you're a Redd Kross fan, you definitely need to grab a copy; and if you're not a Redd Kross fan, well, I weep for your eternal soul.
I also recently did a preview writeup for the Forward on the new Lou Reed exhibition that has opened up at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. This looks absolutely fantastic — the friends of mine who have already seen it assure me that it is, indeed — and I can't wait to get back to NYC to spend some serious time with "Uncle Lou".
And speaking of major cultural figures — the new George Carlin documentary inspired this piece for the Forward, in which I look back on the impact that his 1972 album Class Clown had upon the fragile eggshell minds of myself and my grade school classmates, even though we didn't actually discover the album until a good five years after its release. (For the record, his "Teenage Masturbation" and "Baseball-Football" bits also had a profound influence on us, but since those were both on 1975's An Evening With Wally Londo Featuring Bill Slaszo, I didn't get into 'em here.)
Though Rolling Stone left my name off the byline because of... reasons, I still massively enjoyed writing a feature for them in which six artists of varying ages, backgrounds and musical styles talk about the first time they ever heard The Sex Pistols. My absolute favorite part of it was getting to talk to Peter Hook of Joy Division/New Order fame about how seeing the Pistols in Manchester back in 1976 quite literally changed his life forever. I'd never spoken with Hooky before, and the 20 minutes or so we spent on the phone together had me laughing so hard I thought I was gonna cough up a lung. Check out the piece and see why!
The Dan Epstein Trilogy sounds like the name of my next power trio (and it might well be!) — but it's actually what That Seventies Card Show host John Keating has dubbed my three baseball books. I could argue that The Captain & Me doesn't actually qualify as the third installment of what began with Big Hair & Plastic Grass and Stars & Strikes, since I co-authored it and it thus has a different voice and feel than the other two, but I'm really just happy to have published enough baseball books to qualify for a trilogy. In any case, John and I recently had a really fun (and occasionally emotional) conversation about 70s baseball and music, and if you're in the mood to hear me gab at length on those topics with someone who definitely knows their shit, I highly recommend clicking the above video.
And finally, speaking of The Captain & Me — folks have been asking me since before the book was even released if they could buy copies signed by both Ron and myself. Unfortunately, the pandemic washed out our book tour before it could even begin, and various other issues have prevented Ron and I from meeting up to sign a stack of them together. However, we may have finally breached that hurdle; so if you're interested in buying a copy signed by both co-authors, check back here in a week or two for more info!
Yes, 2021 was a challenging shitshow in so many respects, filled with stress and loss and portents of doom... But as I rang in the New Year watching old music videos with Mrs. Epstein and the above-pictured Otis and Angus, I had the opportunity to reflect upon all the good stuff that happened to me this past year.
Thanks to the Covid vaccines, I was able to see my parents, sister, aunts and cousins for the first time in nearly two years, and I was able to go back to LA for the first time since 2018 to spend some precious hours with my beloved uncle John Padgett before he left this earthly realm. As 2020 came to a close, I wasn't sure I would be able to see any of these folks in the coming year, so 2021 was a real winner in that respect. Thank you, science...
Additionally, I got to hang out with some really dear friends during my visits to LA and NYC, as well as a few here in NC — like over at Ziggy's Refuge — something that was likewise pretty much out of the question in 2020. Here's to seeing all y'all (and many more of my wonderful pals) again in 2022...
Oh yeah — The Captain & Me, my collaboration with Ron Blomberg about his beautiful friendship with Thurman Munson, came out in April and made it all the way to the #1 spot on Amazon's Baseball Books chart at one point. Huge thanks to everyone who read it, reviewed it, bought it and enjoyed it. Yes, it was disappointing and frustrating to not be able to promote it with a real book tour and in-person signing events; but hey, the book's coming out in paperback this May via Triumph Books, so maybe we'll have a chance to "do it right" this time.
I'd also like to thank all my editors and colleagues who assigned or hooked me up with work this past year. Freelancing is always a rollercoaster ride, but I got to do some really fun and satisfying stuff in 2021, ranging from writing three episodes of AXS-TV's "If These Walls Could Rock" to interviewing the great Sérgio Mendes for FLOOD magazine to having a marathon three-hour chat with the ever-voluble Dave Wyndorf of Monster Magnet for Revolver. Special thanks to Adam Langer, who has been my editor in various incarnations going back to my freshman year in college, and who trusted me to write about everything from the Marx Brothers to T.Rex to Jaws for him at the Forward this past year.
I made it through the painful horror of a kidney stone and dodged a bullet on a prostate cancer scare — both of which caused me to change my diet for the better. Speaking of food, Mrs. Epstein says I really took it to the next level with my cooking this past year, and I'm hoping to expand my repertoire even further this next one, beginning with today's shrimp-and-veggie sausage gumbo.
I got back — gingerly dipping a toe at first, and then diving in headlong — into making, writing and recording music in 2021, finally laying waste to a creativity/confidence block that had dogged me for the entire 21st century. I even formed a one-man "band," dubbed The Corinthian Columns in a nod to my four-decade fascination with classical architecture, and put several tracks up on Bandcamp with more to come. (And thanks again to everyone who dug and downloaded "Jingle Jangle Christmas"!)
Speaking of music... while watching old favorites last night from The Records to The Jam to Dave Edmunds to KISS to Iron Maiden to, well, Triumph, I started thinking about who I was back in the late 70s/early 80s when I first saw those videos. I don't think I could have even imagined then what my life would be like in my mid-50s, but if you'd told 14 year-old me that I'd be living in a cute little house with a beautiful and hilarious wife and three adorable cats, and that my work would revolve around writing, music and baseball... well, I would have had plenty of questions for you, but I'd ultimately be pretty stoked about the prospect.
So yeah, I'm pretty stoked on the prospect of being able to spend another year in this existence, even with all the massive challenges we face as a people and a planet. As my friend Jeremy Scott (whose band The Toy Trucks delivered my favorite track of 2021, a cover of The Corvettes’ appropriately-titled "Beware of Time") sagely noted this morning, this next year can be better than the last one, "but you gotta want it, not hope for it. Work is required." But I'm making room for hope, too — as my father told me in an email last night, "Hope is the only viable option and love the only route to finding hope. Laughter is good too."
Wishing all of you fine folks unlimited hope, love and laughter in 2022. Don't waste it.
It's hard to believe that The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson will be released a week from today. The passage of time has been so strangely blurred over the course of the last year, it seems like just yesterday that Ron Blomberg and I had our first phone conversation about collaborating on this project... but it also seems like about ten years ago.
In any case, I am incredibly excited to have the book finally coming out (via Triumph Books, who have done a marvelous job with everything from the cover art to promotion), and incredibly pleased with some of the reviews we've gotten for it so far — most notably in the pages of no less than the Wall Street Journal, where Ben Yagoda wrote that he "gobbled The Captain & Me up like a packet of Famous Amos chocolate-chip cookies." (Extra points for the period-appropriate pop cultural reference, Ben!)
So far, at least, the response makes me feel like Ron and I accomplished what we set out to do with this book — give people a better sense of who Thurman Munson was as a teammate and a pal, as well as shed additional light on what it was like to play for the New York Yankees during those promising-but-frustrating seasons in the first half of the 1970s. If you dig the Yankees, New York City, 1970s baseball, moustaches, delicatessens, mobsters, locker room japery, and heartwarming tales of friendship, I think you'll find much to enjoy herein. And for those of you who have asked if I was aware that The Captain & Me shares a title with a Doobie Brothers album, I was indeed; in fact, the Doobies were one of Thurman's favorite bands, which is something we get into in the book.
In a normal world, Ron and I would be up in NYC next week to do in-person signing events. While we still hope to be able to do some later this spring and summer, the sad fact is that it would be difficult/irresponsible to put on such events while the pandemic is still raging. So in the meantime, we've got a virtual Zoom event happening on April 21 with Bookends in New Jersey; Ron and I will be talking about the book, and all "attendees" will receive a copy of it with Ron's signature. Ron's a great talker, and it should be a lot of fun.
If you would like a copy of the book with my signature on it, the best way to do that at this point would be to buy a copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Booksamillion, Bookshop, or your local bookseller, and then send it to me with a SASE so I can sign it and get it back to you. Message me via the email link on this blog, and I'll let you know where to send it.
As always, I'd like to thank everyone who has supported and encouraged my writing over the years — especially all of you who bought Big Hair & Plastic Grass when it first came out, thus propelling me on this amazing journey. I hope our paths will cross again, sooner than later.
Hank Aaron hitting home run number 715 is my first vivid baseball memory. Before that, baseball was always something that my dad had going on the TV while I was busy playing GI Joe or reading Mad Magazine or building models or drawing comics. Sports in general wasn't my thing in those early elementary school days.
But when the 1974 baseball season was about to begin, with Hank all but certain to break the Babe's home run record in the first week or two of April, my second grade teacher Mrs. Crippen brought the topic up for class discussion, and impressed upon us the sense that history was about to be made. I knew what a legend Babe Ruth was — after all, there was a gigantic, gilt framed photo of him hanging on the wall of Bimbo's, our favorite Ann Arbor pizza parlor — and even though I didn't understand much about baseball yet, I didn't mind when my dad made us watch Monday Night Baseball on April 5 instead of The Rookies, which was what I usually watched on Monday evenings. And I remember getting chills when Hank actually hit the record-breaker out of the park, which thankfully happened before my 9 pm bedtime.
A few weeks later, my dad had to go to Atlanta for a social work convention that my grandfather was also attending, and he took my sister and me with him so we could hang out with our grandparents. My two most vivid memories of that trip are of getting absolutely tanked on Mountain Dew while watching It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World on the TV in my grandparents' hotel room, and of my grandfather driving us by Fulton County Stadium so I could see where Hank had hit his record-breaking homer. Unfortunately, the Braves were on a road trip at the time; so instead of spending the evening at the ballpark, we had dinner at an Italian restaurant in Underground Atlanta, a now-long-vanished tourist attraction that managed to be both strange and strangely underwhelming.
It feels very weird to me that Hank's gone now, even though he had a long, full, heroic and rewarding life. His figure has always towered over baseball, or at least my perception of it, even though I never saw him play in person. I never met or interviewed him, either; and as I said to a friend the other day, I don't know what I could have possibly said to him had our paths ever crossed. It's like seeing the Grand Canyon in person — whatever comes to your lips will inevitably sound lame and insufficient.
My one great Hank Aaron story is actually a Neil Diamond story, and it didn't actually happen to me. In fact, it may not even be true, but it's too good not to share. It was told to me in the early 90s by a guy named David, who was a regular customer at See Hear, the record store I worked at in Chicago from 1989 to 1993...
In 1989, David was living in Atlanta, and a friend of his who was working as Neil Diamond's costume (or hair or makeup) person invited him to come and hang out backstage when Neil came to town and played the Omni. David was a friendly and easy-going guy, the kind of person you felt like you'd known forever the first time you met him, and Neil apparently took an immediate liking to him when they were introduced. After giving David a personal tour of his wardrobe and pointing out some of his favorite stage outfits, Neil invited David to join him, his band and crew for dinner, which was being catered by a local restaurant of note.
David happily accepted the invitation, and enjoyed the dinner immensely — at least up until the point when Neil turned to David and asked him, "David, how come there aren't more black people at my concerts?"
David just about choked on his food. For one thing, what a question! For another, David was just some white, Jewish dude from Georgia. "Why the hell is Neil even asking me this?" he thought to himself.
He chewed on the question — and its proper response — for a minute before answering. "No offense, Neil," he said, "but I just don't think black people like your music very much."
Neil, to his credit, did not act at all offended; he merely seemed mystified. "But why not?" he asked David, completely straight-faced. "I'm a SOUL singer!"
Flash forward to that night's show: David takes his seat, which — thanks to the hookup from his friend — is located right in the first couple of rows. He turns back to take in the rest of the arena, as one does in such situations, and immediately notices (much to his great surprise) that Hank Aaron and his wife are sitting directly behind him. David tries to play it cool; as naturally garrulous as he is, even he can't think of a way to break the ice and strike up a conversation with the legendary Home Run King. Still, he can't help himself from looking back from time to time throughout the evening to see what Hank is up to — and sure enough, Hank is genuinely digging the show, knows the words to all the songs, etc.
After the show, David goes backstage to say goodbye to his friend, and winds up passing Neil in the hallway.
"Hey Neil!" he shouts after him. "Hank Aaron was in the audience tonight!"
Neil stops in his tracks, punches the air and yells "YES!!!"
***
Oh, and speaking of baseball and Jewish guys from Georgia, my book with Ron Blomberg — The Captain & Me: On and Off the Field with Thurman Munson — will be released via Triumph Books on April 20, and is currently available for pre-order at Amazon.
Yeah, it's been a rough year for most of us, with good news often in short supply. Happily, one of the big projects I've been working on came to fruition in 2020: Stompbox: 100 Pedals of the World's Greatest Guitarists, has now been officially released. Co-edited by James Rotondi and myself, and featuring the stunning photographs of Eilon Paz and written contributions from an impressive variety of musicians, music journalists and pedal aficionados, Stompbox is a deep dive into the culture and history of guitar effects pedals, exploring the many reasons and ways that guitarists (and other musicians) use them.
Stompbox features effects used by some of my personal favorite guitarists of all time, including Jimi Hendrix, Ernie Isley, Davie Allan, Marc Bolan and Mick Ronson — but it covers a wide stylistic spectrum which includes everyone from Tom Morello and Radiohead's Ed O'Brien (who wrote the book's foreword!) to Jack White and Dimebag Darrell. If you love guitar pedals and/or are fascinated by how gear plays into the creative process, this is a book you can get lost in for hours. But hey, don't just trust me on this — check out the sweet write-up the book recently received from WNET's ALL ARTS!
But wait, there's more! In the process of putting Stompbox together, Eilon and I began to come in contact with pedal aficionados whose collections contained some mind-glowingly rare and cool effects; though not specifically used by legendary guitarists, they definitely deserved to be showcased in a book of their own. Thus was born Vintage & Rarities: 333 Cool, Crazy and Hard to Find Guitar Pedals, which is available in a limited first edition run by itself, but can also be purchased in tandem with Stompbox as part of the slipcovered "Stompbox Brick" (so called because it's truly heavy on a variety of levels). If you have a guitar player on your Christmas list — or you're a guitar player who wants to give yourself a nice present (c'mon, you deserve it) — you really can't go wrong with either (or both) of these books!
And while you're at it, scroll down to the bottom of the Stompbox Shop page to enter The Stompbox Motherlode Giveaway, which includes pedals from JHS Pedals, Keeley Electronics, Death By Audio, Earthquaker Devices, Electro-Harmonix, AnalogMan, Walrus Audio, Strymon, Fairfield Circuitry, Wampler, Thorpy FX, Chase Bliss Audio, MXR, and Dunlop, as well as a yearly All-Access guitar lesson subscription from Trufire. The winner will be drawn on December 30, so be sure to enter before then. (And follow the Stompbox Instagram account for more opportunities to enter, as well as to see cool excerpts and outtakes from the books.)
Hope you're all staying safe and taking care of yourselves during these dark times. Hopefully we can all rock together again once summer rolls around!
I am extremely proud and excited to announce that Ron "Designated Hebrew" Blomberg (#12 in this pic) and I have signed a deal with Triumph Books for a memoir of his Odd Couple-esque friendship with the man behind the plate — the late, great Yankees captain Thurman Munson.
Titled The Captain and Me, the book will reveal a lot about Thurman that isn't widely known (not to mention plenty of amusing/interesting tidbits from the glorious days of 70s baseball) and is currently slated for a 2021 release.
A huge thank you and/or a tip o' the Monsanto Toupee to everyone who has bought and supported my previous baseball books — you made this possible!
"I thought you might want to read this," said Grandpa Fred, handing me his copy of Jim Bouton's Ball Four.
It was the summer of 1977, and I had just arrived at my grandparents' palatial (to me, at least) home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I was eleven years old, and looking forward to a blissfully relaxing month of swimming, golfing, throwing a baseball against the back steps, watching baseball on TV, and reading about baseball in the air-conditioned comfort of my grandfather's study. The baseball bug had bitten me hard, and I was determined to get my hands on any reading material that could expand my knowledge of my favorite sport — and, once again, Grandpa Fred had come through for me.
As a child of the Seventies, I was already well aware that baseball men were not necessarily squeaky-clean role models to be looked up to — after all, I had just seen a livid Billy Martin try to punch out Reggie Jackson on national TV — and I'd already heard that Ball Four was supposed to be "controversial". But by "controversial," I was expecting a gritty, hard-bitten exposé, something along the lines of Serpico or All The President's Men, to name two other books that my grandfather probably had no business lending to a grandson who had just graduated fifth grade. What I found instead, much to my surprise and delight, was a riotously funny account of life in the major (and minor) leagues that, if anything, reminded me most of an adult American version of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle's Down With Skool series. Like Nigel Molesworth, DWS's intrepid schoolboy narrator, Jim Bouton took me into a world full of bizarre rituals, arcane slang, side-splitting pranks, and unforgettable characters. Ball Four's detractors complained that Bouton trashed baseball's heroes; but in my eyes, he not only (further) humanized them, but also made me wish (even more than I already did) that I could be part of their gang.
As these things will do, the sad news about Bouton's death brought back vivid memories of that summer in Alabama, and reminded me of just how much Ball Four — and its sequel, the almost-as-great I'm Glad You Didn't Take It Personally — formed my understanding of (and attitude toward) major league baseball. With the possible exception of Bill Lee's The Wrong Stuff (which I wouldn't read until over a decade later), I can't think of another player memoir that so beautifully captures the joy of playing baseball, yet so unsentimentally delineates the punishing stupidity and cold-blooded venality that permeate the game's executive and administrative sectors... and which have only become more pervasive in the decades since Ball Four's original publication. (As a friend of mine pointed out, the timing of Bouton's death was one final Fuck You to the baseball establishment, since it all but obliterated the buzz around the release of Bud Selig's new autobiography.)
Most of Bouton's on-field heroics were accomplished well before I became interested in baseball, and I wouldn't learn about his social activist side (he protested the apartheid rule of South Africa in 1968, long before that was on the radar of your average American) until many years after I first read Ball Four. But he became a hero of mine that summer, and even more the following year, when — armed with only a knuckleball and an insouciant smirk — he made a brief comeback with the Atlanta Braves. In interviews, he always came across as warm, witty, and maybe even a little bit silly... and I always hoped that I'd get a chance to talk with him someday.
That chance finally came three years ago, when I was writing a story for VICE Sports on the 40th anniversary of the short-lived Ball Four sitcom, which ran on CBS for only five weeks before being unceremoniously sent to the showers. I had become friends with Michael Bouton, Jim's son, via Facebook, and I approached him about setting up an interview with his dad. Unfortunately, Jim had suffered a stroke by then, and Michael explained to me that his dad preferred to do our interview via email, because he was self-conscious about not being able to "retrieve" certain words. So I sent Michael a list of questions... which Jim apparently enjoyed so much that he decided he wanted to get on the phone with me, after all.
The Jim Bouton I spoke with in 2016 turned out to be just as kind and funny as I'd always imagined, and — except for stumbling over maybe two or three words — was just as articulate, as well. It remains one of my all-time favorite interviews that I've ever done, and this seems like as good a time as any to share the whole thing with the world. I am forever indebted to Michael for making it happen, and forever grateful to the old "Bulldog" for taking the time to go down memory lane with me, even if some of the memories we discussed weren't exactly sweet. May he rest in peace and power...
Jim Bouton: The Big Hair & Plastic Grass Interview
DAN EPSTEIN: With the 40thanniversary of the Ball Four TV series coming up, it needs to be —
JIM BOUTON: Forgotten? [Laughs]
No chance of that, at least on my watch. So, whose idea was it to turn it into a TV series?
It was such a long time ago, I don’t remember if it came down to one person. There was a group of friends that would hang out at the Lion’s Head bar in [Greenwich] Village — Vic Ziegel, Marvin Kitman and myself, and others. We just thought this might be a good thing to do. Little did we know! [Laughs]
When Ball Four was first published, nobody was knocking on your door to make a TV show or movie out of it?
Well, this was just within a year of when the book came out; we weren’t sitting around for years waiting for this “golden opportunity” — we just thought, “Well, this will be fun!” And it certainly was fun to be part of Ball Four, and to listen to all those wonderful characters. So why couldn’t a sitcom be just as funny as the real players, the real guys? It was certainly fun to think about the possibilities of transferring that to the TV screen.
Though obviously, you faced some challenges in doing so…
Standards and Practices, I think was the name of the division — we were not allowed to capture the grittiness and the language, that kind of stuff. We weren’t able to put it on the screen. [Laughs]
You certainly couldn’t have anyone saying “Ah Shitfuck,” a la Joe Schultz.
Yeah, and you couldn’t say “Horseshit” — you could have “Horse!” maybe, or “Horse dot-dot-dot”. There were all sorts of ways they had to neuterize it. When we would sit around at night… our plan was to sit around and write in the daytime, but since it took us so long to come up with anything, we’d still be writing stuff at 2 in the morning. The funniest part about the whole sitcom was writing aboutthe sitcom, and we had some great fun with that. A sitcom about a sitcom would have been better than the actual sitcom, itself. That should have been the show! [Laughs]
The CBS people would come into the writing room, which is a dark place, in many respects. [Laughs] There were many vice presidents — none of whom could write, but they could “help.” So they’d say something like, “Maybe this guy could be a jerk!” So we’d listen to their ideas, and then they’d leave the room and we’d start laughing about what they were saying. We’d do the best we could with it. They would say things like, “Why can’t you write like Gone With The Windor The Old Man and the Sea? That would be good!”
I’ve been in writing rooms with network vice presidents. It can be a pretty soul-crushingly awful experience.
Well, when I think about it, I never think about it as a negative in my life; it’s not like, “Oh boy, we really screwed that up,” or, “That was terrible!” It was so much fun just to sit there and fail at a very high level. [Laughs] We were having a good time; we were enjoying ourselves. But the censor wasn’t enjoying it, and the vice presidents weren’t enjoying it. And apparently, right off the bat, the audiences didn’t like it very much, either! [Laughs]
Was the shooting of the show fun for you, as well?
Oh, absolutely. We accidentally did some really wonderful things, but we weren’t allowed to do much of them.
For example?
Ben Davidson played Rhino, the catcher. He was a professional football player, from that same era of characters [as in Ball Four] — guys who made it to the big time but barely made it through college to get there. Ben Davidson was the only "real" person on the set, because everyone else was an actor. [There was one scene where] Ben improvised and lifted up one of the coaches, then hung him on a hook in the locker room by the back of his shirt. The guys from CBS saw that and were like, “What are you doing?!? That’s not a good idea! We’ve got a liability here!”
Were you always supposed to play the lead character in the show?
I don’t remember whether anyone thought that would be a good idea or not, but they probably thought it would be inexpensive, because I was not a real actor. And who knew what a difficult chore that would be! Oh god…
Ball Four debuted on CBS in September 1976, and only lasted five episodes before being cancelled. Did you have the sense that it would get a quick axe, or did the cancellation take you by surprise?
Well, shooting an episode would last, you know, a week, and we were always feeling like we were behind — we always had that feeling of, “Uh-oh, this is not any better than the one we did yesterday!” [Laughs] We would watch other sitcoms like Welcome Back, Kotter, and there would be a put-down line like, ‘Up your nose with a rubber hose!’ And we would start laughing, and thinking, “Maybe we need a line like that? How about, ‘Stick it in your doo-dah?’” [Laughs] It was four amateurs trying to do something that we’d never done before.
Plus, it’s 2 in the morning, and you’re all punchy…
Oh, exactly. We didn’t even know what day it was! Jesus… Finally, about three episodes in, they told us, “We’re going to have to cancel this show.” We said, “Ohhh, thank you! Now we can live our lives — we can sleep, we can have weekends, we can have friends over. We can be real people!”
Was that when you decided to rededicate yourself to your baseball comeback?
Well, I needed to get out of the TV business by then, for my own safety. [Laughs] I was playing semi-pro baseball in New Jersey, amateur baseball, and I was pitching pretty good for a guy who was in his late-thirties; I was having a good time, and my knuckleball started to move around, and I thought it might be a good idea to go down to spring training, and see if I could work out with some minor league team. And Bill Veeck ended up offering me a minor league contract with the White Sox.
Your brief return to the majors in September 1978 remains one of my favorite childhood baseball memories. It all seemed so improbable — you were thirty-nine, and you hadn't pitched in the majors since 1970 — but you actually pitched pretty well in three out of five appearances!
I did pretty well. This was with the Atlanta Braves organization, and Ted Turner — well, he was agreeable to those kind of things. I said to him, “Give me a shot, and if I don’t embarrass myself, let’s see what happens!” Only a real nut, like a Bill Veeck or a Ted Turner, would say, “Hey, that sounds like fun!” It was kind of like a sitcom, only you had more control over it — and I was not humiliating myself on national television!
So I went to spring training with their minor league Triple-A team, I think it was, and I got better and better. The last game of spring training, they were going to have the Triple-A guys play against the major league Braves. And the idea was, “Let Bouton pitch for the minor league guys against the big leaguers!” I thought, “Well, this sounds better than a sitcom, but not that much different.” I actually pitched a very good game, and I think we won the game. I did so well that they sent me to the minors, and said, “See what you can do!” I did really well there, and they eventually invited me to the big leagues. I beat the San Francisco Giants, and they were not goofing around — they were in a pennant race! But I beat those guys. And then I pitched the next game against the Astros and James Rodney Richard. [Bouton threw seven innings at the Astrodome, giving up only five hits and two earned runs, but didn’t get the decision.] So that was fun!
More fun than sitting in the writers’ room at CBS?
Oh, yeah. It was like, “God, please don’t let me write any more scripts!”
Back to the TV series, though — the episodes covered some controversial topics for the time, such as gay players, female sportswriters in the locker room, and the use of pep pills...
I thought those subjects would be interesting — and I thought that people would be interested in them. But we couldn’t get most of what we wanted to do past Standards and Practices.
Do you think the show was actually a few decades ahead of its time?
It might have been — and it might get there yet, by another route. Who knows?
But a reboot of a Ball FourTV series isn’t something you’d like to be involved with?
Uh, not in an important role. [Laughs]
Harry Chapin wrote and sang the show’s theme song. How did that come about? Were you a fan of his music?
Yeah, Harry Chapin was a nice guy. I was friends with a handball player named Jimmy Jacobs, and Jimmy Jacobs had a great film library. I happened to run into Harry Chapin through him, and I was telling him and Jimmy Jacobs about the sitcom. Harry’s song opened the show — and then it all went right downhill after the song. I think the best part of the show was Harry’s song.
It's the only part of the show that you can currently find on YouTube.
And that’s a good thing, too! [Laughs]
Do episodes of the show still exist?
I’m hoping they don’t exist anymore, just for mercy purposes!
Before I let you go... do you have any thoughts on the enduring appeal of Ball Four, the book? It has long outlived the controversy that surrounded its original release…
When I think of Ball Four, I don’t think of my writing — I think basically of keeping notes. Those players were the funny guys; you can’t make up those guys. They were all characters. Doug Rader, Gary Bell, Don Mincher… One of the great things about baseball players back then was, they were not sophisticated guys. They were not college guys; they were guys outta the mines or off of the farm, guys trying to make a living. And that’s why it took so long [for MLB players] to get real money, because the guys just wanted to play ball.
Sure, they realized, “Maybe we oughta be getting a little more money.” But if they’d said to those guys back in the 1950s or even 60s, “Okay, we’re not going to pay anybody anymore, there’s no money whatsoever,” the players would have still said, “Well, we’ve got two teams here — why don’t we just play and see who can win this game?” You know what I mean? They wanted to play ball. They were very, very interesting people. They came from mostly small towns, and they just wanted to play ball.
And your book immortalized them.
The best thing I ever did was to keep notes and write all that stuff down. I’d keep notes all day long; and when I’d run out of paper, I’d write on a popcorn box or an air-sickness bag, whatever was handy. And then, at the end of the day, I needed to look at my notes because there were so many funny things going on. Wonderful characters; I love them all now, even the ones I hated! Now I was listening to the players, now that I was writing things down, they were now fodder for great material. So I began to think about them in a positive way. They were not competitors for playing opportunities in games; no, these guys were funny! And that’s why Ball Four is so funny — it’s not me, it’s the players.
And because the minor leagues have kind of been replaced by college ball, the players are much more savvy now, much more sophisticated. They’re wiser, and all of that stuff — but I don’t get the sense that the crazy guys, the wacky guys, the funny guys are there anymore.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to me, Jim. It’s been a real pleasure.
Well, it was fun remembering those things. And now I have to go lie down for a while. [Laughs]
Ever since (well, even before) Big Hair and Plastic Grass was published, people have asked me if there were any plans for an audiobook... and now, finally, I can answer that question in the affirmative! And read by the author, no less!
Thanks to Blackstone Publishing, an audiobook version of BH&PG — read by yours truly — will be released next week (June 25). It will be available via Audible, Audiobookstore, Google Play, Kobo and presumably any other audiobook outlet. And for those of you who still prefer physical media, there's a 10-CD set available, as well!
So if you're looking for a little 1970s baseball history to take the edge off your daily commute, or you simply want to luxuriate in my dulcet tones for hours at a time, we've got just the thing for you. An enthusiastic tip o' the Monsanto Toupee to the good folks at Blackstone for making this happen, to their art department for totally nailing that "1979 Topps Baseball Cartoon" look, and to Tom Rowan at the Sound Lab Recording Studio in Greensboro, NC, who expertly guided me through the harder-than-it-sounds process of recording an audiobook.
There's something about films made and/or set in the New York City of the 1970s that always keeps me coming back for more, and the same goes for the London of the same period. Maybe it's because childhood visits to both of these cities vividly imprinted themselves upon my fragile eggshell mind; while these were clearly not easy cities to live in, the vibrant energy of citizens going about their daily business against a backdrop of faded grandeur and crumbling glory captured my youthful imagination in the same way that Hubert Robert's paintings of "life among the ruins" would later fascinate me. Though there were signs of decay everywhere, there was also beauty in that decay — a beauty so profound that even a midwestern boy raised on TV and the intrinsically American philosophy of "newer is better" couldn't fail to notice.
I recently finished reading Rob Chapman's Psychedelia and Other Colours, a fascinating and occasionally frustrating book that is less of a history of the original psychedelic era than a series of free-associative essays about why and how LSD impacted popular music the way it did. One of the best aspects of Chapman's book is the way he lays out the differences between American and British psychedelia — not just stylistically, but also culturally. In his British chapters, he repeatedly underlines just how dingy and drab life was in post-WWII England, especially when compared to the space-age shininess of life in the US; and how even at the height of "Swinging London," most of the grumbling grey city still felt barely a few years removed from the traumas and deprivations of life during The Blitz.
If Chapman's book didn't exactly turn me on to any great psychedelic records that I wasn't already aware of, it did lead me to The London Nobody Knows, a haunting documentary filmed in 1967 by Norman Cohen (but apparently not released until 1969), which was based on the 1962 book of the same name by Geoffrey Fletcher. Narrated by James Mason, who also serves as the film's tour guide, the film explores London's seamy underbelly (and its Victorian remnants) at a time when the wrecking ball of progress was really starting to kick into high gear.
Chapman cites The London Nobody Knows as being particularly illustrative of how shabby the city really was, even at the peak of its pop cultural influence, and the film certainly doesn't disappoint in that regard. Though a few sequences here are speeded up a la Benny Hill for comic relief, the London we see here is a bleak place, indeed, one filled with rusting Victorian urinals, rotting pubs, splintering tenements, toothless street performers, and open-air markets filled with wriggling eels and shady pitchmen. The few minutes devoted to the city's fashionably-attired youth seems almost jarringly out of place, like they were only added (and possibly under protest) after the producers begged to see some of the mods and mini-skirts that London was famous for.
Again, though, there is beauty in the decay — and with his dry wit and seemingly unflappable countenance, Mason is perfectly suited to guiding us through it. Whether wryly cocking an eyebrow at the ugliness of the newer buildings along the north side of the Thames, or begging the pardon of a market patron that he's inadvertently bumped, he comes off more like a savvy local than a movie star. In one particularly moving sequence, he unselfconsciously sits down with several senior residents of the local Salvation Army, and lends a sympathetic ear to their hard-luck stories. (I'm guessing he prudently chose not to mention his own brush with Thunderbird wine.)
My favorite moment in the film, however, is a non-Mason one: A shirtless street performer of indeterminate age hectors passerby to bind him with a length of heavy chain, from which he then performs a Houdini-like escape. While the man's performance is quite entertaining in its own right, and certainly harkens back to an earlier London — there were almost certainly escape artists doing the same trick on the city' streets in the 19th century, if not hundreds of years before that — what blew me away was the realization that I had actually seen this very gentleman in action, seven years after this sequence was filmed. While I knew that I would recognize some of the London I experienced in '74 in this film, I had no inkling that I would actually recognize one of the people I'd encountered while I was there.
That year, my sister and I were living in Leamington Spa with my father, who was on sabbatical at Warwick University. On weekends, we would often take train trips to other parts of the country, and of course London was on our hit list. While my most vivid memory from our London trip is of ordering a plate of ravioli at a restaurant, only to find that there was nothing inside of said ravioli — London dining was significantly less worldly than it is today — our visit to the Tower of London also stands out for me, and not just because of the thrill of coming face to face with nearly 900 years of English history. On our way to the Tower entrance, we came upon this very same shirtless gent, who had attracted a rather sizable audience with his salty pronouncements and his impressive feats of escapism. (There was also a younger partner working with him, who was similarly swathed in chains and locks.) After busting free, the man passed the hat, and then cussed the crowd out for not putting enough into it. "There's not enough in here to get me into a pay toilet," he cried. "I hope every last one of ye gets bloody diarrhea tonight!" Oh, how my sister and I howled with laughter; I think I even asked my dad for a few coins to contribute to his cause, simply because I was impressed that anyone would loudly wish diarrhea upon a group of tourists.
Obviously, that's the sort of thing that sticks with you for decades after the fact, and when my wife and I visited the Tower of London last spring — her first visit, and my first time returning since 1974 — I half-expected that this guy would be standing outside the tube station, haranguing us into tying him up. He wasn't there, of course; I'm guessing he'd be around a hundred years old today, if he's even still alive. Still, it was a real thrill to see him again in this documentary, and to feel viscerally connected for a second to the London of 1967, even though I didn't actually experience the city until seven years later.
Dan Epstein is the author of Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s and Stars and Strikes: Baseball and America in the Bicentennial Summer of '76, both published by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press. He writes about baseball, music and other cultural obsessions for a variety of outlets and publications. He lives in Greensboro, NC, and is available for speaking engagements.